RPG Evolution: Do We Still Need "Race" in D&D?

The term "race" is a staple of fantasy that is now out of sync with modern usage. With Pathfinder shifting from "race" to "ancestry" in its latest edition, it raises the question: should fantasy games still use it?

“Race” and Modern Parlance​

We previously discussed the challenges of representing real-life cultures in a fantasy world, with African and Asian countries being just two examples. The discussion becomes more complicated with fantasy "races"—historically, race was believed to be determined by the geographic arrangement of populations. Fantasy gaming, which has its roots in fantasy literature, still uses the term “race” this way.

Co-creator of D&D Gary Gygax cited R.E. Howard's Conan series as an influence on D&D, which combines Lovecraftian elements with sword and sorcery. Howard's perceptions may have been a sign of the times he lived in, but it seems likely they influenced his stories. Robert B. Marks explains just how these stereotypes manifested in Conan's world:

The young, vibrant civilizations of the Hyborian Age, like Aquilonia and Nemedia, are white - the equivalent of Medieval Europe. Around them are older Asiatic civilizations like Stygia and Vendhya, ancient, decrepit, and living on borrowed time. To the northwest and the south are the barbarian lands - but only Asgard and Vanaheim are in any way Viking. The Black Kingdoms are filled with tribesmen evoking the early 20th century vision of darkest Africa, and the Cimmerians and Picts are a strange cross between the ancient Celts and Native Americans - and it is very clear that the barbarians and savages, and not any of the civilized people or races, will be the last ones standing.

Which leads us to the other major fantasy influence, author J.R.R. Tolkien. David M. Perry explains in an interview with Helen Young:

In Middle Earth, unlike reality, race is objectively real rather than socially constructed. There are species (elves, men, dwarves, etc.), but within those species there are races that conform to 19th-century race theory, in that their physical attributes (hair color, etc.) are associated with non-physical attributes that are both personal and cultural. There is also an explicit racial hierarchy which is, again, real in the world of the story.

The Angry GM elaborates on why race and culture were blended in Tolkien's works:

The thing is, in the Tolkienverse, at least, in the Lord of the Rings version of the Tolkienverse (because I can’t speak for what happened in the Cinnabon or whatever that other book was called), the races were all very insular and isolated. They didn’t deal with one another. Race and culture went hand in hand. If you were a wood elf, you were raised by wood elves and lived a thoroughly wood elf lifestyle until that whole One Ring issue made you hang out with humans and dwarves and halflings. That isolation was constantly thrust into the spotlight. Hell, it was a major issue in The Hobbit.

Given the prominence of race in fantasy, it's not surprising that D&D has continued the trend. That trend now seems out of sync with modern parlance; in 1951, the United Nations officially declared that the differences among humans were "insignificant in relation to the anthropological sameness among the peoples who are the human race."

“Race” and Game Design​

Chris Van Dyke's essay on race back in 2008 explains how pervasive "race" is in D&D:

Anyone who has played D&D has spent a lot of time talking about race – “Racial Attributes,” “Racial Restrictions,” “Racial Bonuses.” Everyone knows that different races don’t get along – thanks to Tolkien, Dwarves and Elves tend to distrust each other, and even non-gamers know that Orcs and Goblins are, by their very nature, evil creatures. Race is one of the most important aspects of any fantasy role-playing game, and the belief that there are certain inherent genetic and social distinctions between different races is built into every level of most (if not all) Fantasy Role-Playing Games.

Racial characteristics in D&D have changed over time. Basic Dungeons & Dragons didn't distinguish between race and class for non-humans, such that one played a dwarf, elf, or halfling -- or a human fighter or cleric. The characteristics of race were so tightly intertwined that race and profession were considered one.

In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the changes became more nuanced, but not without some downsides on character advancement, particularly in allowing “demihumans” to multiclass but with level limits preventing them from exceeding humanity, who had unlimited potential (but could only dual-class).

With Fifth Edition, ability penalties and level caps have been removed, but racial bonuses and proficiencies still apply. The Angry GM explains why this is a problem:

In 5E, you choose a race and a class, but you also choose a background. And the background represents your formative education and socio-economic standing and all that other stuff that basically represents the environment in which you were raised. The racial abilities still haven’t changed even though there is now a really good place for “cultural racial abilities” to live. So, here’s where the oddity arises. An elf urchin will automatically be proficient with a longsword and longbow, two weapons that requires years of training to even become remotely talent with, but a human soldier does not get any automatic martial training. Obviously, in both cases, class will modify that. But in the life of your character, race happens first, then background, and only later on do you end up a member of a class. It’s very quirky.

Perhaps this is why Pathfinder decided to take a different approach to race by shifting to the term “ancestry”:

Beyond the narrative, there are many things that have changed, but mostly in the details of how the game works. You still pick a race, even though it is now called your ancestry. You still decide on your class—the rulebook includes all of the core classes from the First Edition Core Rulebook, plus the alchemist. You still select feats, but these now come from a greater variety of sources, such as your ancestry, your class, and your skills.

"Ancestry" is not just a replacement for the word “race.” It’s a fluid term that requires the player to make choices at character creation and as the character advances. This gives an opportunity to express human ethnicities in game terms, including half-elves and half-orcs, without forcing the “subrace” construct.

The Last Race​

It seems likely that, from both a modern parlance and game design perspective, “race” as it is used today will fall out of favor in fantasy games. It’s just going to take time. Indigo Boock sums up the challenge:

Fantasy is a doubled edged sword. Every human culture has some form of fantasy, we all have some sort of immortal ethereal realm where our elven creatures dwell. There’s always this realm that transcends culture. Tolkien said, distinct from science fiction (which looks to the future), fantasy is to feel like one with the entire universe. Fantasy is real, deep human yearning. We look to it as escapism, whether we play D&D, or Skyrim, or you are like myself and write fantasy. There are unfortunately some old cultural tropes that need to be discarded, and it can be frustratingly slow to see those things phased out.

Here's hoping other role-playing games will follow Pathfinder's lead in how treats its fantasy people in future editions.

 

[MacConnell]

"Quick question: How many people who are arguing this issue are people of color?"

All of them.

 

[Afrodyte]

Huh ???

I didnt ascribe "harmful motive" to you.

But this question is part of the logic : "You are not [insert group] therefore you cant have an opinion or your opinion is biased and doesnt count".

*sigh*

It's right there: "Say how you feel or what you think, but be careful about ascribing motives to the actions of others." Point-blank, you have no idea why I asked that, or what I plan to say about the answers I get, so you have no business saying any of this to me. Now leave me alone.

 

[Aldarc]

I think you missed my point:There are some things that one species "have in their genes" that other species could only achive with active learning.

I'm highly skeptical that swords and longbows would reasonably qualify. On some level, the songbird comparison with elven weapon proficiencies seems like a false equivalence.

 

[LazarusKane]

(...)
Point-blank, you have no idea why I asked that, or what I plan to say about the answers I get, so you have no business saying any of this to me.

So, to settle this: Why are you asking?

 

[Maxperson]

Your hyperbolic response (that fails miserably to answer the question) suggests the inverse to be true.

So answer what I posted(which clearly was not everything) instead of evading.

 

[Afrodyte]

So, to settle this: Why are you asking?

Because I don't want to assume things about people participating in this thread before I say something I'm observing about it.

 

[Pauper]

Whew..can't believe I got through that whole thread.

I have noted a few people making the point that 'race' is a perfectly valid word to use for fantasy gaming, since the various folk being described are differentiated by explicit traits (dwarves are stocky and knowledgable about mining and stonework, elves are lithe and prize art and the archery skill). That part does make some sense to me.

The part that doesn't make sense is that D&D has never really treated the fantasy 'races' as being all that different, fundamentally, than humanity. I've very seldom seen someone portraying an elf character, for example, who really explores the idea of getting into the head of a character whose adolescence lasted about as long as the full lifespans of those around her, or who fully embraced the idea of coming from a culture that is drastically different from the human cultures we know. Basically, most players (and to some degree, the game itself) treats the other fantasy 'races' as different humans -- elves are skinny humans who are good with magic and sniff disdainfully at sentimentality, while dwarves talk about 'honor' and 'the clan' and basically drink twice as much as any sane human can. (And it's not just D&D; replace 'magic' with 'science' in the above statement and you can replace 'elves' with 'Vulcans' and 'dwarves' with 'Klingons' and not miss a beat.)

*That's* why the question of representation, what word we use, is important -- because insofar as the game presents non-humans as basically 'different humans', the concept of 'race' in D&D is precisely the concept of 'race' outside of D&D.

Contrast with gender, as some commenters already have; the argument could certainly be made that 'gender' isn't really that important in a game, and as long as we're not basically incorporating sex discrimination into the game's rules (hello, max 14 strength for halfling girls!), it shouldn't be a big deal. But the designers of 5th edition decided to make the explicit statement that gender can actually be whatever you as the player want it to be, specifically to be inclusive of players who also feel that gender as a construct used in the 'real world' doesn't really work for them. The people who feel that gender isn't a big deal are precisely the people who are comfortable with the default presumption of gender and thus don't feel excluded when binary gender is considered the default in the game.

The same is true for race. If you had a game where elves and orcs were sufficiently different from human that not just their mechanical portrayal but the actual way you'd play them in game makes them sufficiently different from human that they are clearly different and separate from humans, then you can probably argue that 'race' is being used as a clinical, descriptive term and not as an arbitrary construction. But in a game where elves and orcs are basically just humans with latex spirit-gummed onto different parts of their heads (hello Bright and its portrayal of orcs!), it's really hard to say 'oh, race is clearly the correct word, since orcs get a Strength bonus and elves get a Dexterity bonus, which makes them fundamentally different in their portrayal in-game'.

--
Pauper

 

[kenmarable]

Quick question: How many people who are arguing this issue are people of color?

I am not. I know there has been comments from people of color (yourself included) where some have a problem with it and some don't. I figure that's reason enough to swap a word out for something else that works just as well (if not better), because people should have fun playing these games rather than being uncomfortable with something unnecessarily included just because it's always been that way. If it is replaced there is literally zero harm to me and my games, and it helps others. Sounds great to me!

However, personally, I just really don't like the use of "race" because it doesn't actually mean what RPGs use it to mean. It's simply the wrong word. Even if it wasn't offensive to some, I'd still want it replaced with a term that makes more sense for the blob of semi-related concepts they try to cram into "race." Being offensive (or even just uncomfortable) to some players is even more reason!

 

[Tanin Wulf]

NO!
THAT'S THE WHOLE ING POINT! RACE ISN'T BIOLOGICAL. RACE IS A SOCIETAL CONSTRUCT WE IMAGINE AND PRETEND HAS A BASIS IN BIOLOGY BUT THAT DOESN'T ACTUALLY EXIST AS ALL HUMANS ARE FUNCTIONALLY BIOLOGICALLY IDENTICAL AND MORE DIVERSITY EXISTS WITHIN RACIAL GROUPS THAN BETWEEN THEM! THAT WHAT ARE CONSIDERED DISTINCT "RACES" SHIFTS OVER TIME BASED ON SOCIETAL VALUES! THAT THE ENTIRE CONCEPT OF RACIAL PURITY IS A MYTH!!!

Race is 100% a sociopolitical construct. And pretending otherwise is ignorant. Like believing in phrenology. And saying that races exist in the fantasy world is subtly supporting the idea that races exist in the real world and that there's some basis to the concept of race and racial purity.

Hmm. I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as to say "race" is 100% a sociopolitical construct. There do seem to be some DNA-level differences that ignoring racial factors harms our understanding of the disease. For instance: sickle cell anemia.

NOTE: This is in no way an endorsement of racial superiority, or saying the differences in the races are important to society or anything else stupid/white-power-y.

Of course, the fact that my Gypsy (his preferred term over Rom) friend from Wisconsin has sickle cell disease... and he's the whitest (i.e. pale and pasty) guy I know. But his great grandmother was black, so he MOST LIKELY inherited that trait from her.

My point being it's probably not... 100% sociopolitical. Just mostly. Like 99%.

Put another way: genetics is really fun and cool if you can set aside all the politically loaded nonsense that non-geneticists throw around like they know what those terms mean in the context of genetics instead of sociology!

 

[Celebrim]

The same is true for race. If you had a game where elves and orcs were sufficiently different from human that not just their mechanical portrayal but the actual way you'd play them in game makes them sufficiently different from human that they are clearly different and separate from humans, then you can probably argue that 'race' is being used as a clinical, descriptive term and not as an arbitrary construction. But in a game where elves and orcs are basically just humans with latex spirit-gummed onto different parts of their heads (hello Bright and its portrayal of orcs!), it's really hard to say 'oh, race is clearly the correct word, since orcs get a Strength bonus and elves get a Dexterity bonus, which makes them fundamentally different in their portrayal in-game'.

That's an interesting perspective, and there may be something to it. Certainly I am in the camp of, "Non-human races should be different to the point of being alien." and that perspective may be influencing my opinion. But note, part of the reason I do that is that I feel I have to justify why anything in my game is in my game, and what I certainly don't want - either as perception or as conscious or subconscious reality - is for a race to be some sort of thin commentary on real world races. If the dwarfs are drunken gaelic people, the elves are Nordic people, and the orcs are black people or some other 'scary' minority group, I'm going to feel like your world is either a bit racist or could easily fall into racism in the hands of someone who was prone to think in that manner. Where as if the elves of my world are representative of child-like innocence and wonder, libertarian social values, and the simultaneously fragile but enduring natural world, no one is going to think my elves are meant to be a commentary on real world racial issues.

Plus, the fact that my races are truly diverse to me builds strength into the setting, so that I can tell stories I could never tell if all my races were basically human. One of the cities in my world is a rare alliance of elves and men, and it happened because an elf lord and a human lord were both imprisoned by a mutual foe. Now an elf that is imprisoned in a dark dank place will usually die within a few days, because an elf deprived of beauty starves and loses the will to live. The human lord however began to sing, and for the duration of their imprisonment the beauty of the human's singing kept the elf lord alive. Now in the long lives of elves, that was basically just three generations ago. His kindred do not forget that, so even with all the difficulties involved in keep a multiracial community (literally multiracial, and not merely multiethnic) and all the challenges it has making it work, they have persisted in their alliance. I can't tell these kind of stories if you rob me of the uniqueness of the fantastic races. What's the point in having a fantasy if you aren't fantastic?

What's the point of diversity if the least actual bit of diversity terrifies you?

As for Bright, I thought the first half the movie was surprisingly good, and the last half mostly embarrassingly bad. There is a sense in which I think you are right, but I also think that they did at least try to portray the orc character in a way that was a bit alien. In particular, the orc character was receiving information on sensory channels his human partner didn't have. He was literally blind to a lot of things is partner found obvious, whereas the orc was portrayed in a way that for an human would be considered autistic and thus he was blind to a lot of information channels that his partner found so obvious that he didn't need to think of them. That was hardly perfect, but then again it's still one of the better attempts at making the alien both alien and relatable in the movies. I'd have to turn to books for better examples. Still, I agree that one area that Bright failed is that it felt a little bit too much 'alien race is allegorical stand in for human ethnic group'. I think it tried to be nuanced about that, talking both 'black lives matter' and 'blue lives matter' at the same time without condemning either one, but ultimately just wasn't written well enough for the seriousness of its subject matter.